In “South Asian Food Makes Northwest Arkansas Taste Like Home,” Gravy producer Mackenzie Martin heads back to Northwest Arkansas (NWA), where Walmart began, to look at the retail giant’s influence on the region’s demographics and culinary landscape—specifically, spurring a boom of South Asian restaurants and food shops.

Walmart is seen by some as the king of genericness. Most of the products it sells don’t have much of a regional or local spirit. Yet, in NWA, Walmart (along with other big employers) is making the community more diverse by bringing in people from all over the country, and the world. And as the population has diversified, so, too has the quality of food and restaurants.

Between 2011 and 2018, the Indian American population in Bentonville alone more than tripled. It would be easy to see the infrastructure or community resources lacking. Thankfully, in Bentonville, people are starting to step up to fill the gaps. Twenty years ago, you’d have to go to Tulsa, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City to find Indian food served in a restaurant, a four-to-seven-hour round trip. Now, there are a dozen local options, in addition to several Indian grocery stores.

To investigate the way recent immigration has influenced the quality of South Asian food and restaurants, Martin visits a local Indian restaurant, a festival at the area’s first Hindu temple, and what is believed to be the first Pakistani restaurant in the region.

Many of the transplants here tell her that the resulting community is a uniquely welcoming one. Immigrants of all kinds participate in shared activities and culture while preserving the traditions of the countries they grew up in.

This is particularly on display at BBQ King, where Indian and Pakistani dishes share space on the menu. The blending of these two cuisines and cultures here is notable, since India and Pakistan have a complicated and tense relationship that goes back generations and includes several wars. Abdullah Asif, a student at the University of Arkansas whose family owns the restaurant, says it’s not like that in the United States, though: “We’re all part of the same community here.”

The Northwest Arkansas of today is a cosmopolitan region where people from all over the world make a living and find a home. They’re making space for others but also working to preserve what makes them unique. And thanks to places like BBQ King, they now have one more place to gather and meet each other.

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In “Cultivating Mexico in Northwest Arkansas,” Gravy producer Mackenzie Martin digs into the story of Yeyo’s, a vibrant family-run Mexican restaurant in Northwest Arkansas.

Here, the once-rural Ozarks are now one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. That’s partly thanks to major employers like Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt, but there are also many amenities the region offers, like a surplus of hiking and mountain biking trails and Crystal Bridges Art Museum. And as the population increases, so does the diversity of the region.

When the Rios family moved here from California in the early 2000s with dreams of owning land and starting a farm, it was a bit of a gamble. The family of Mexican immigrants says they were the first non-white family at the Bentonville Farmer Market around 2006.

Six years later, chef Rafael Rios opened a food truck, Yeyo’s Mexican Grill, named after his dad’s longtime nickname. The plan was to use produce from the farm and sell farm-to-table Mexican food. At first, he struggled—but he kept with it, and it paid off. Nearly 20 years later, the Rios family has two farms, two food trucks, a bar specializing in mezcal, and a flagship restaurant. Not to mention, Rafael Rios has been named a semifinalist by the James Beard Foundation for Best Chef: South four times.

Most importantly, though, Rios has a bigger mission than just him. He feels like diners in the U.S. aren’t very knowledgeable about the complicated, and often expensive, processes required to make high-quality Mexican cuisine, such as tortillas from scratch or really good mole sauce. That’s why he’s trying to change his customers’ perceptions of Mexican food by bringing them along with the cooking process. The restaurant kitchen is completely open, so guests see (and hear) everything happening there.

Education is a part of the job Rios willingly takes up. If a customer questions whether his tortillas are really all corn, for instance, he will literally take them back to the kitchen and show them the machine they use to shape and cut the tortillas.

He couldn’t do it without his family, though. All seven Rios siblings and their parents live in Northwest Arkansas, and 18 family members are involved with the restaurant in some way, from management to farming to dishwashing. In this episode, Rios shares his family’s journey to Yeyo’s and Arkansas’ changing food landscape.

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The black-eyed pea is not your average bean. Like many staple foods of the African Diaspora, it’s become a powerful symbol of food sovereignty and survival. With the migration of the black-eyed pea from West Africa during the transatlantic slave trade came a superstition about good luck. This belief combines folklore from West Africa and Western Europe in the American South. Our episode follows the journey of the black-eyed pea, time traveling through the folklore of the past and an Afrofuturist vision of what’s still to come.

This episode was reported and produced by Sarah Holtz.

Special thanks go to:

Michael Twitty

Adrian Miller

B. Brian Foster

Ira Wallace

Music by:

"Neuanfang" by Kielicaster

"Shangri La" by Kielicaster

"Dusty" by Crowander

"Clay Pawn Shop" by Blue Dot Sessions

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In “What Makes Gumbo...Gumbo?” Gravy producer Katie Carter King takes us all the way to Northern California to understand what folklorist John Lauden meant when he said, “Gumbo is not a word, it’s a syntax, a way of putting something together.”

Cooks and culinarians have long argued about gumbo. Is it Creole or Cajun in its roots and history? Is it a soup, a stew, or some mysterious third thing? But perhaps nothing gets Southerners more heated than conversations about how you make gumbo—from the ingredients to the recipe technique, the dish has long provoked spirited debates. But in the southeast corner of San Francisco, one man has become known as Mr. Gumbo, and he’s not looking to pick a fight, but rather start a conversation.

Mr. Gumbo—also known as chef Dontaye Ball—grew up making gumbo with his grandmother. But after she passed away and he took helm of the family’s gumbo tradition, Dontaye began to realize the limitations of a single pot of gumbo. The seafood-centric recipe he’d long made accidentally excluded many of his loved ones: vegans, vegetarians, folks with shellfish allergies. So, he decided to cook up something new, something a bit unorthodox. He created a gumbo bar, complete with all the delicious possibilities his friends and family could dream up, including both different soup bases and different accouterments. A recurring event sprung to life, quickly morphing from holiday party to block party to pop-up business.

Growing up, community was always at the forefront of Dontaye’s mind. His grandmother centered serving the community in her cooking. Dontaye was raised in the Bayview, a sunny, geographically isolated neighborhood that has been the last corner of the city to gentrify. Once home to Maltese farmers and Chinese shrimpers, the area became home to thousands of Black workers who migrated following the eruption of World War II. A tight-knit community formed, one that took care of its own. While Dontaye had never planned on opening a full restaurant, when a space became open on a prominent corner in his own neighborhood, he saw how much possibility gumbo could offer—and knew he couldn’t say no.

In this episode, Katie Carter King learns about Dontaye’s path to becoming a restaurateur and community leader. Additionally, geographer and UC Santa Cruz professor Lindsey Dillon helps situate the Gumbo Social story in the larger landscape of Bayview and San Francisco’s Black residents and culture.

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In “The Joyful Black History of the Sweet Potato,” Kayla Stewart reports for Gravy on sweet potatoes, which Southern-born Black Americans have baked, roasted, fried, distilled—and long revered. Stewart takes listeners across the United States to learn how African Americans are finding new, interesting ways to enjoy sweet potatoes.

Harvey and Donna Williams own and operate Delta Dirt Distillery in Helena, Arkansas. Both grew up in Arkansas, and Harvey was raised on a farm that has been in his family for generations. His father began growing sweet potatoes to make efficient use of his small acreage, and Williams grew to love the root for its nutritional value. At a conference, he met an entrepreneur distilling sweet potatoes and decided to try it himself. In 2021, Delta Dirt Distillery was born, earning a host of beverage awards. But for the Williams family, success is about more than medals. It’s about recognizing the history and pride associated with sweet potatoes–a history that’s likely made the product even more compelling to Black Americans in the area. 

Jeremy Peaches is an agriculture consultant who works at Lucille’s 1913, a non-profit organization operated by Houston chef Chris Williams that aims to combat food insecurity in vulnerable communities. While sweet potatoes are beloved for their sweet, earthy flavor, Peaches says they were also one of the first major sources of economic opportunity for Black American farmers, in part thanks to their resilience during the annual harvest.

Though sweet potatoes can be enjoyed raw, roasted, or distilled, there’s nothing quite like the sweet potato pie. To understand how these pies have been comforting Southerners around the holidays for centuries, Stewart steps into the kitchen with restaurateur and cookbook author Alexander Smalls, who explains the history of sweet potato pie and why Black Americans make such a strong claim to the dish. Finally, Joye B. Moore, owner of Joyebells Desserts and Countrysides, tells of the generational traditions that make her famous sweet potato pies so exceptional.

For this episode, Stewart interviews Harvey Williams, Jeremy Peaches, Alexander Smalls, and Joye B. Moore to learn how this root vegetable nourishes Black entrepreneurs, cooks, and communities—bodies and souls.

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In “Eating at the End of the World,” Gravy producer Katie Jane Fernelius takes a close look at the culture of disaster prep, especially how people eat when disaster strikes. As it turns out, how people provision for disaster can differ wildly from how they actually feed themselves, and each other, once a storm blows through.

After living without power for almost two weeks following Hurricane Ida, Fernelius fell down a rabbit hole of prepper content. She discovered cartons of shelf-stable water, large cans of peaches and green beans, wide varieties of dehydrated meals, and large “apocalypse buckets” full of everything a person might need following a disaster. In short, she discovered a booming industry.

So, she was curious: Who preps? For what? And why?

In this episode, Fernelius talks to cultural anthropologist Chad Huddleston, who studies the rise of prepper culture—and consumerism—following Hurricane Katrina. He talks about how the kinds of food that preppers keep in their pantries has shifted over time, and how “prepper” foods have never been so popular and available as they are today.

Fernelius also interviews a mutual aid organizer in New Orleans named Miriam Belblidia, who contrasts the utility of “prepping” against her actual experience of living in the aftermath of a hurricane. She says that when we think of prepping, we should be far more concerned with how we prepare community resources than how we prepare individual ones.

Special thanks to Chad Huddlestone, Miriam Beblidia, and all the people who organized mutual aid in New Orleans following Hurricane Ida. Thank you to Heather Cole for her fact-checking. Thank you to Clay Jones for his sound design and mixing.

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In “Where There's (Southern) Smoke, There's Help for Restaurant Workers,” Gravy producer Evan Stern introduces listeners to the Southern Smoke Foundation, a relief organization dedicated to providing a safety net for food and beverage workers.

As the pandemic reminded us, restaurants aren’t just places where people go to satisfy hunger. The best ones reflect, anchor, and at times help define the communities they serve. From diners and drive-thrus to chophouses, maintaining them is a group effort made possible by managers, line cooks, servers, and cleaning staff, whose duties are essential and frequently challenging. They also comprise one of the largest labor forces in the US.

Even so, these same workers often lack health coverage, live shift to shift, and don’t have the option to work remotely. In times of unforeseen hardship, they might find themselves forced to choose between paying for housing, groceries, and medical care. In the absence of governmental reform, the Southern Smoke Foundation is working to respond to and call attention to these needs.

Southern Smoke helps facilitate free mental health counseling and puts immediate cash in the hands of laborers in need. In this episode, we’ll learn of its history from Houston-based chef and founder Chris Shepherd, who was inspired to take action in 2015 upon learning his friend and sommelier had been diagnosed with MS. From there, we’ll learn about how forces like Hurricane Harvey and the 2020 pandemic reshaped the charity’s focus. Finally, Charles Parra tells how Southern Smoke stepped in when his bartending career was upended after a major accident.

This episode explores why efforts to make this industry more equitable are worth pursuing. As Shepherd asks, “We are there to serve and take care of people, but who takes care of us?”

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In the episode “Catch of the Day: Why Alabama Loves Red Snapper,” Gravy producer Irina Zhorov takes listeners to the fisherman’s paradise of the Gulf of Mexico, where you’ll find tuna, amberjacks, mahi mahi, swordfish, and more. There’s a commercial fishery worth nearly $1 billion annually and the Gulf has the highest level of spending by recreational anglers, which includes charter trips, in the whole country: more than $5 billion annually. One of the most important fish driving this plenty is red snapper.

Gulf red snapper are a bottom-dwelling fish that can live to be 50 years old. When they're older and bigger – they can weigh more than 50 pounds–they can live in the water column. But when they're smaller juveniles they prefer to hang out on reefs or other structures. They've been fished in the area since at least the 1800s. More recently, they've become an important cultural and economic staple in the Gulf, particularly around the Florida panhandle and in Alabama. Why is snapper so important for Alabamians specifically?

The Gulf floor off the coast of Alabama is flat and muddy for many miles out to sea. When anglers fished for snapper in the past, they'd have to find the rare reef or travel far into the Gulf to find the fish. In the 1950s, fishermen started dropping debris, like car hulls and military tanks, into the Gulf to build artificial reefs. In the 1980s, this practice was formalized by the state and federal governments, which established what is now the country's largest artificial reef zone. And the state did something else novel, too. In most places with artificial reef programs, the state or municipality handles the reef building and keeps reefs public. Alabama does this, too, but it also allows regular citizens to go out and drop materials for private artificial reefs. The result has been a massive build-up of reefs in the Gulf off the coast of Alabama. Snapper congregate at the reefs, so catching them is all but guaranteed. The result? A snapper fishing bonanza. 

For Gravy, Zhorov tags along with a family in town for a Gulf fishing trip, led by Brian Annan, a charter boat captain who's been building reefs for decades. He says without the reefs he wouldn't have a business. Scientists like Kesley Banks, Sean Powers, and Mark Albins say the reefs are also helping snapper population numbers recover – for years the fish was considered overfished and had unsustainable stock numbers. And for tourists who come to the Gulf to fish, the artificial reefs are just sources of a good time.

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Order a hot pastrami on rye at any delicatessen and you’ll taste the briny terroir of the Jewish Diaspora. Pastrami is an iconic cured meat that migrated with Eastern European Jews to America and became synonymous with the deli, a beloved third place for Jewish communities across the country. In Jackson, Mississippi, that place was the Olde Tyme Deli, which Judy and Irv Feldman owned and operated from 1961 until 2000. In this episode, we’ll trace the migration of pastrami to the Deep South, where Southern Jewish identity coalesced during another moment of reckoning—the civil rights movement.

Sarah Holtz reported and produced this episode. Sarah is an independent audio producer who documents cultural history in New Orleans, New York, and the Bay Area.

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In “America’s Lost Peanut and the Price of Bringing it Back,” Gravy producer Otis Gray takes listeners on a journey through the history and revival of the Carolina African Runner Peanut, an heirloom crop thought to be extinct until 2013. Today, a contingency of heirloom enthusiasts and chefs are trying to bring the historic peanut back into the spotlight through farm-to-table dining. The question is: if not everyone can sit at the table, are we doing it the right way?

In 2015, heirloom farmer and “flavor chaser” Nat Bradford was entrusted with a handful of the small, rust-colored African Runner Peanuts uncovered in a seed bank at North Carolina University—peanuts that trace their lineage back to the transatlantic slave trade. These peanuts, once a staple in Southern cuisine, were nearly lost to time, replaced by larger, more industrialized varieties like the Virginia peanut.

This Gravy episode delves into the complex history of this crop, uncovering how it was grown by enslaved Africans for sustenance, quietly thriving in clandestine gardens on plantations. Culinary historian Michael Twitty explains the peanut’s deep cultural and historical ties to the African diaspora and the way it shaped Southern foodways. As the peanut reemerges, it raises important questions: Who gets to grow, cook, and profit from these heirloom crops today?

While passionate about preserving the peanut, Bradford has found that reviving heirloom ingredients in today’s economy is costly. The African Runner Peanut, marketed primarily to high-end chefs, is expensive to grow and difficult to shell, limiting its accessibility. Chef Kevin Mitchell, a culinary instructor and historian, shares these concerns. While he uses heirloom crops like the African Runner Peanut to educate his students about food history, he also grapples with the reality that many of the people who helped shape this crop’s history are now economically excluded from its revival.

Through conversations with experts like Twitty, Mitchell, and culinary historian Tonya Hopkins, the episode explores the extractive nature of the modern food industry and how white chefs and high-end restaurants often overshadow Black culinary history. While the African Runner Peanut’s story is one of cultural and historical importance, it’s also a story of economic and racial disparity. How do we grapple with the broader implications of reviving lost crops and whether our methods are truly equitable?

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